How to get fall through behaviour in bash case statements

As many people know C has the famous (or infamous) fall through behaviour in switch statements. Is something similar available for bash?

Indeed, just look at the man page:

Using ;& in place of ;; causes execution to continue with the list associated with the next set of patterns. Using ;;& in place of ;; causes the shell to test the next pattern list in the statement, if any, and execute any associated list on a successful match.

In other words, where you would leave out the break; in C you would write ;& instead of ;; in bash. Hope you have a good use case for it (sorry for the pun).

Upgrading DVD burner firmware from Linux via a VirtualBox VM

I was given a TSSTcorp SH-224DB DVD burner. This has a SATA interface. The firmware revision shown in dmesg was SB00. I decided to update this to SB01, the last available. Problem was the file was a Win32 executable. How to run this from Linux?

The drive in question is connected to my Linux machine via a USB to SATA dongle. I have a Windows XP VM so I decided to see if it could access the drive. The first time I tried connecting the drive which appeared as /dev/sr1 to the VM. The update executable said it couldn't find any suitable drive.

After some reading I tried another tack, I allowed XP to access the dongle via USB forwarding. This time running the update executable found the drive and duly updated the firmware.

The first attempt didn't work because VirtualBox was presenting a virtual DVD to the VM. But what the program wanted was access to the SATA interface, albeit via the USB layer.

This may work for other drives for which only a Windows executable is available.

MPLABX 5.0 IDE error: (1180) directory "build/default/production" does not exist

Posting this so that people can find the solution.

I experienced the same problem as posted here where compilation would fail with this error if the project file is on a network drive, a NFS mount in my case. Running make in the directory from the CLI got the same error. Strange to say, the fix of copying it to a local directory worked.

I don't know what the root cause is but this is another thing you could try.